420

Several years ago, I was leading a retreat for high school students and it was time for us to take a break.  I told the students to be back by 4:20 - and suddenly the room erupted into laughter.  Hmm…

Well, inquiring minds like mine need to know, so during the break I asked a couple of students why so many people had laughed.  They readily told that it was because “420” is a slang term for smoking marijuana.

Here is the one of the definitions for 420 posted on urbandictionary.com -

420 was thought of years ago as the time of day some people got together to smoke pot. Now it is used as code for "Let's go get high." Also, some people consider April 20th "National Pot Smoking Day."

So just in case you hadn’t previously known, now you are hip to some teen lingo:  “420” is slang for “smoking weed”.

I know that many people smoke pot.  And yet, I think that few adults and even fewer teens are aware of how dangerous smoking weed really is. 

First of all, it is not only a number (420), but also a number (substance that numbs).  I know for sure that smoking pot, getting drunk, and doing other drugs – as well as numbing out other ways like cutting, eating disorders, and sexual sin - causes emotional retardation.  When we ‘numb out’ we never learn to express our thoughts and feeling in ways that are healthy and mature, so we get emotionally stunted at the point we begin making these bad choices.  It happened to me.  My ‘numbing’ began when I was fourteen and continued until I was nineteen; during that time I drank a lot and smoked a lot of weed.  And when I finally made a commitment to Christ and stopped numbing - at the age of nineteen - I woke up with the emotional maturity of an 8th grader.  It took me years to recover from my self-imposed emotional retardation.  This happens to a lot of people; perhaps you know some of them.  Perhaps you are one of them.

As devastating as these emotional and developmental consequences are, new research shows that smoking pot is far more damaging to our bodies than many people had previously imagined.   When I was a teen, one of the ways that I justified my use of marijuana was by telling myself, and anyone who would listen, that there was no evidence that smoking pot was any more harmful than drinking alcohol.  At the time, that was true; the jury was still out.  But now the research is pouring in, and we are starting to discover that the dangers of smoking weed are very real and quite devastating.

I recently read an article called Light Drugs, Heavy Consequences:  New Evidence on the Dangers of Marijuana and discovered some scientific facts that I want to share with you.  A few of them surprised even me…

• Society has seriously underestimated how dangerous cannabis (marijuana) really is.
• Drugs such as marijuana…are often the gateway to other addictions.
• Marijuana is more dangerous than LSD or ecstasy.The cannabis sold today is far more potent than a decade or so ago. There has been up to a 25-fold increase in the amount of the main psychoactive ingredient, tetrahydrocannabidinol (THC), compared with the early 1990s.
• People who took the active ingredient in marijuana, THC, showed reduced activity in an area of the brain called the inferior frontal cortex, which keeps inappropriate thoughts and behavior, such as swearing and paranoia, in check.
• It is now generally agreed among doctors that cannabis is an important causal factor in mental illness.
• The link between cannabis and psychosis is quite clear now; it wasn't 10 years ago.  
• 50% of healthy volunteers who were administered THC began to show symptoms of psychosis.
• By the end of the decade one in four new cases of schizophrenia could be triggered by smoking cannabis.
• Those who started to use the drug in their teens had a greater probability of suffering mental illness, having relationship problems, and failing out of school or getting fired from their jobs.

These factors led the author of the article to conclude that "Cannabis really does look like the drug of choice for life's future losers."

And while I do not prefer to call people 'losers', I do believe that there is a lot to lose when one smokes weed, not only in terms of potential damage to one's body, but also the detrimental effects on one's mind and on one's interpersonal relationships.

Inspired by these thoughts, I urge you to resist the temptation to smoke weed.  If you currently smoke pot, I encourage you to get help so that you can quit.  And if you have friends or family members who think that smoking pot doesn’t really hurt anyone, let them know how much it hurts you that they are hurting themselves.  Feel free to share this blog with them, keep praying for them, and keep telling them how much you love them.